INTRODUCTION: The Guideline and Template Content Starts on the Following Page What This Is A survey that can be sent to team members during or after a project, to solicit their feedback on how the project was conducted. It applies to any project; and questions can easily be added to focus on additional areas for your project. Why It s Useful To capture lessons learned from the project while they're fresh in people's mind. The results can be summarized and recommendations passed on to future teams. How To Use It Send the following survey through email or on paper to members of the project team. Let them know that results can be kept anonymous (to encourage people to be frank in their assessments). Send out this survey before any group "lessons learned" meetings. The feedback you receive from the survey can help point to particular areas that should get special exploration in the group lessons learned meeting. The Guideline and Template Content Starts on the Following Page Copyright 2006 Emprend Inc/ ProjectConnections.com Page 1
SECTION Post-Project Survey 1: General Project Issues and Communication The questions are geared to your particular project but wherever appropriate you can comment about release-level issues too. Note: add any particular comments you wish... 1. How clearly defined were the objectives for this project? 2. How clearly defined were the objectives for your work? 3. How clear were you on your role in the project? 4. How adequately involved did you feel in project decisions? If you did not feel involved, what decisions did you feel left out of? 5. How efficient and effective were project team meetings? What would you change? 6. How efficient and effective were technical meetings? What would you change? Copyright 2006 Emprend Inc/ ProjectConnections.com Page 2
7. How well do you feel the executives support this project? 8. How adequate has cross-functional participation been? What were the problems encountered in the project-functional area relationship, why, and how could they be fixed? What cross-functional participation, if any, was lacking? 9. Do you feel appreciated, recognized and rewarded for your efforts? What if anything has been lacking? 10. To what degree is do you feel the entire team was committed to the project schedule? What if any issues are there? 12. To what degree have any "people issues" gotten in the way? What issues? 13. What communication, organization, structural problems in general were encountered, and how could we have done better in these areas? Copyright 2006 Emprend Inc/ ProjectConnections.com Page 3
SECTION 2: Schedule Estimation Issues NOTE: This survey isn't intended to collect exhaustive data on everything right now. We might decide after the post-mortem to work with a sub-group to investigate certain estimation issues, in order to help us improve next time around. This survey just helps us ferret out the rough scope of any issues. Which of the following estimation issues did you personally have and what was the impact? I was diverted to work on another project full-time. Project: Diverted for how long? Impact on your project work: I overestimated the amount of time I would have each week to work on this project. The other work that interfered was The amount of time per week it took up was Impact: calendar schedule slip of days weeks months My initial schedule did not include some pieces of technical design or coding work that I subsequently realized I had to do. Describe briefly: Impact (additional hours of work): My initial schedule did not take into account certain project "other" work such as attending other people's design reviews, doing two rounds of my own design reviews, etc. Describe: Impact: calendar slip to my work of days weeks months My estimates for particular tasks were not accurate. Describe: type of task, how "off" the estimate was (days, weeks). Why was it difficult to estimate? What would help produce better estimates next time? Copyright 2006 Emprend Inc/ ProjectConnections.com Page 4
I unexpectedly had to re-do some work. Describe: (Did something in the system design change that forced you to redesign? Was there a spec misunderstanding? etc.) Impact on your schedule: What could have helped prevent the problem? Knowing what you know now, how would you do the scheduling/estimating process differently next time to avoid any problems noted above? Copyright 2006 Emprend Inc/ ProjectConnections.com Page 5
SECTION 3: Design, Implementation, Test Processes 1. How effective was our architecture/system design process in phase 2 and 3? 2. How effective were our functional specs? 3. How effective were our design (or implementation) specs? _ 4. How effective were our design reviews? 5. How effective were our code reviews or hardware reviews? 6. How well were interfaces defined? 7. How well were design and interface decisions documented? 8. How effective has interaction/cooperation between technical "Sub-teams" been? Copyright 2006 Emprend Inc/ ProjectConnections.com Page 6
9. How useful was your unit testing? Did you take unit testing into account in your schedule? 10. How smooth do you feel Integration has been? Comments (why or why not?): 11. How comprehensive was integration testing, especially to allow SQA testing to get off to a good start? 12. How well is the build process working? 13. To what degree did you have the tools you needed for testing? Copyright 2006 Emprend Inc/ ProjectConnections.com Page 7
SECTION 4: Perceived Project Life Cycle, Development, or Process Issues 1. Is there any way in which you think our development process hampered this project? If so, how? 2. What would you change about our development process? 3. What would you like to better understand or see better documented about how to use our process on this type of project? Copyright 2006 Emprend Inc/ ProjectConnections.com Page 8
SECTION 5: Closing 1. What were up to 5 main causes for schedule slips, and how could we avoid those causes in the future? 2. Was the project significantly delayed/hampered by outside dependencies (outside to the project, that is)? Which ones? How can we resolve these issues? 3. What were the main bottlenecks on the process? 4. What were the main sources of frustration in the project? Copyright 2006 Emprend Inc/ ProjectConnections.com Page 9
5. If we had to do this project again, what is the one thing that you would change (related to process, not to technical solutions)? 6. For the next project, how could we improve on the way project was conducted? Feel free to add any other comments here: Thanks very much for all your comments! Copyright 2006 Emprend Inc/ ProjectConnections.com Page 10